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55 points by sippingabonedry 3 hours ago | 21 comments

LFS takes the wrong approach in my opinion. I did it once manually over a couple of days. I suppose I hoped enduring the pain of waiting for the packages to compile would somehow make me smarter. It didn’t. I didn’t learn much. It was like following a baking recipe. I know I need to add eggs and sugar in the ratio it says but I’d be damned if I could tell you why that specific ratio works.

It’s just too much to take in at once. You start by building a cross compilation toolchain but… why? And you add the bootloader dead last, even though it’s the first thing you see when you boot a Linux machine?

I reckon a better approach would be to build it step by step, only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them. First you get the bootloader working, then you get it to actually load the initramfs and kernel, etc… you could even create your own extremely simple initramfs first before adding dracut, etc…

This gets you to a system you can boot and play with asap. And then you can slowly start to discover why you actually need all these things through exploration and experimentation.

nullify88 5 minutes ago

I learned a lot doing Gentoo stage 1. I was also following the guide like a recipe, but at the time I hadn't been exposed to the underlying machinery that is often automated, abstracted away, or done for me already. It was also a good test on how well I could follow instructions and later on apply my own customisations. Like lego.

sixtyj 7 minutes ago

LFS is known but it is really more a cookbook than explanatory principles.

Principles can be studied from “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces“ book - https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

Rob Love wrote the book “Linux Kernel Development”. https://rlove.org/

And then continue with reading LFS.

binarin 20 minutes ago

I've learned the most from LFS long time ago, when I had no internet. I had a mismatching set of Slackware and redhat source CDs, and LFS itself didn't match the versions on CDs too. Since then I can build anything and anywhere, even if it's not cooperating :)

r3trohack3r 36 minutes ago

I liked KISS for this

It was like automated LFS from git

FreeBSD’s Makefile system is also in this ballpark

gigatexal 32 minutes ago

Compiling the packages doesn’t teach much it’s all the glue in between. No? It’s the startup scripts and the configs and creating a kernel and all the things.

It’s on my list of things to do when I have some free time

self_awareness 13 minutes ago

You know, you could also just read about each step to learn more. I mean if you feel you're following a baking recipe, you can just... read about it more. And then have LFS as a simple way to experiment if you want to change anything or not. Also, technically you don't need to have a bootloader installed on your main hard drive if you already have it on another disk.

I mean, eh... last time I checked, this was Hacker news. Yesterday, there was an Ask HN topic on how to enable dark mode on HN. Is this the new hacker culture? Complaining that the resources merely point in some direction instead of specifying details?

lukeify 55 minutes ago

You can tell it's written by real Linux users because the landing page UX doesn't make it immediately obvious where to even start reading.

boomlinde 26 minutes ago

Took me half a second to realize I would probably start with "LFS :: Linux From Scratch is the main book, the base from which all other projects are derived."

voxelghost 14 minutes ago

It is indeed glorious.

partyficial 30 minutes ago

it's like their brain is unaware of the concept of a timeline

esseph 5 minutes ago

[delayed]

khantto 47 minutes ago

[dead]

Celeo 2 hours ago

From the news page:

> Bruce Dubbs - 2026/09/01

> The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 13.1.

cientifico 6 minutes ago

The fastest way to learn and remember what Linux is about

aboardRat4 50 minutes ago

What's the news? This manual has been with us since forever.

steve-atx-7600 49 minutes ago

I'm glad to see its still being maintained after more than 25 years since I last used it.

bmenrigh 43 minutes ago

For a long time (probably 2002-2010) I really wanted to do LFS. But I've been on Gentoo since 2004 which, over the last ~22 years, has probably exposed me to almost everything LFS would have, plus a lot more it wouldn't have. I still wish I'd did it way back when. I probably would stumbled through fewer issues had I.

haunter 26 minutes ago

The last release of the no longer maintained sysvinit version is here (the default is systemd now) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/12.4/

lioeters 28 minutes ago

List of (not all Linux) distributions that can be bootstrapped from source:

https://github.com/vasi/bootstrappable-distros

lrvick 55 minutes ago

We did that, but in containers. https://stagex.tools/

dang 14 minutes ago

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halyconWays 56 minutes ago

I did LFS once, a long long time ago (days of RedHat 7.3, I'd say, 2002), and it was quite educational! It's a good way to learn the fundamentals of what comprises an actual Linux system